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Friday, August 16, 2013

The Five Foot Shelf

Fifty-one volumes: Harvard Classics

In a turn of conversation with The Professor the other day, the Harvard Classics were touched upon. I did a bit of sleuthing about that venerable series and found that the 51-volume anthology of classic works was originally published by Colliers in 1909.It was known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, as Charles W. Eliot, then president of Harvard, was the unwitting instigator of the project claiming that, according to Wikipedia, "the elements of a good liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf."There is everything here from autobiography to Greek drama to essays to fiction and poetry. A fine education indeed.Today, one can actually access the writings online at Project Gutenberg (here) although that would not be quite as satisfying as sitting down with the actual books and browsing through them reading a bit here and there. I also discovered that Christopher Beha wrote an account of a year spent reading all 51 volumes in The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (2009). It is now on my TBR list.That project reminds me of the wonderfully funny book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs about his year spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.I don't have the Harvard Classics but I feel as if someone, somewhere in my family did. I do have an incomplete set of Collier's Junior Classics: The Young Folks' Shelf of Books from 1912 that I will write about another time. Book One contains an introduction to the anthology by Dr. "Five-Foot Shelf" Eliot himself.One can buy sets of the Harvard Classics online and I have seen them at used books stores. Or you might be lucky and find a set at a yard sale or estate sale. Or perhaps you already own your own Five Foot Shelf. If so, I would like to hear about it. How many of the volumes have you read?

6 comments:

I read Beha's book and enjoyed it, but I don't think I'm cut out for that kind of reading myself. Their idea of what is a classic and what "should" be read doesn't always match up with mine. Mostly I like to read for fun.

Lark, I think some of the entries would be slow going but then the collection was published in such a different time - they were still studying Greek in school! I wouldn't mind having a set though, just for the heck of it.

I have a 'DeLuxe Limited Edition No. 1376', medium green bindings, which seems to be a first edition (which I hadn't noticed before), although now that I've been looking on the internet, I see many different 'first edition' sets in different colors - and with later copyright dates (!). It's a complete set, which I bought for $1.00 a book at an antiques store in Georgetown, MA, back in the 1970s. I've only read the first volume from cover to cover, but I've read parts of others (Confessions of Saint Augustine and some others that appear in volumes with multiple works). I believe I've heard of the Beha book, but I haven't read it and it will now go on my TBR list. Thanks for the post!

Nice, Joan. You got quite a bargain. The listing of contents is quite impressive and it is interesting to see what was considered important for a liberal education. I am not sure I would read all the entries included, but it would be nice to have them to hand. Hang on to your treasure!